He’s best known for his roles as blue-blooded cads and cold-blooded murderers, but now Paul Rhys is back playing a nice, ordinary bloke for a change. Here he tells Nathan Bevan about suffering for his art, Welsh vampires and mud wrestling with Ray Winstone

IT’S high summer over the Essex mudflats and Paul Rhys is writhing about in the thick, warm sludge grappling with hardman actor Ray Winstone.

No, it’s not the climactic punch up in another in a long line of British gangster films but the opening scene in the upcoming BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

“We were literally up to our waists in it but I didn’t care – it was love at first sight with Ray.

“He just had me in stitches all day long, the pair of us got along like mad.”

And acting alongside everyone’s favourite Cockney geezer wasn’t the only thing that attracted Rhys to the all-star production, which is expected to be a jewel in the channel’s scheduling crown come Christmas.

“I’m totally obsessed with Dickens and Great Expectations was one of the first book’s I read when I was still in school in Porthcawl,” he says.

“In fact, I live just two streets away from the Dickens Museum in North London, while Gillian Anderson (who plays Miss Haversham) has a place which practically overlooks it.

“So you could say old Charles has been a constant presence in my life, and Compeyson’s a joy to play – he’s this really shady womaniser with a huge scar down his face and aspirations to the aristocracy.”

Yet another villain for the Rhys acting CV then, following on from his recent high profile TV roles as a charismatic but ruthless Welsh vampire in Being Human and a chilling turn as a satanic serial killer in the hit cop drama, Luther.

“I loved doing those, especially Ivan on Being Human – I can remember my agent calling me and going, ‘Paul, I don’t know what you’re up to on television at the moment but there’s like 6,000 fan letters arrived in the office for you’,” he laughs, taking a short break from rehearsing a new touring stage production of Mikhail Bulgakov’s diabolic classic, The Master and Margarita.

“Oh yes, the heavy Russian stuff,” smiles Rhys who, in a theatrical coup, is slated to play the lead roles of both the master and the devil.

“It’s going to be a very big challenge for me because each performance is almost four hours long – so I’ve been training like an athlete for it, watching my diet and doing yoga for an hour before each run-through.

“I have to be really careful though because I tend to give so much of myself to my roles that I’ve made myself ill in the past.”

So much so Rhys has even been hospitalised with pneumonia and experienced mental exhaustion.

“I was playing Beethoven for a 2005 mini-series and would be standing around in the snow in the middle of Poland for months,” he shivers.

“And as fleeces weren’t around in the 19th century I got really sick, ended up on my bloody back in bed for months.

“Another time I ended up losing a hell of a lot of weight, to the point that they called a doctor to the National Theatre and he told me I really shouldn’t go on.”

It must have been a great relief then to finally play a genuinely decent guy in the week-long series of the acclaimed daytime drama Moving On, starring a host of famous faces like Fay Ripley and Reece Dinsdale. It’s also the brainchild of multi-award winning writer Jimmy McGovern. “I know, nice to be normal for once isn’t it,” says the 47-year-old dad-of-one.

“The main reason I wanted to do it was the writing and to be close to anything that Jimmy was involved in because I genuinely believe he’s among the best writers we’ve ever had for telly.”

In his episode, entitled The Donor, Rhys plays a labourer called Andy whose partner (Sally Phillips) asks their gay friend to become a sperm donor after their attempts at having a child prove unsuccessful.

“I’m working class Welsh so I loved the part and wanted to play him with my own accent – but, in the little back story I’d written for him, Andy had previously been an engineer who’d been laid off and forced to find work where he could,” he says.

“Because of situation the country’s in that sort of thing is becoming more and more common, with lots of people having to go into jobs they’d have normally never considered just to stay afloat.”

Luckily, it’s not a situation Rhys has even found himself in.

“No, I’ve been very blessed in that respect,” he admits. “I suppose it’s because I tend to stay away from the middle-of-the-road, more populist stuff, preferring instead the left-of-centre roles.

“I’ve always just been more comfortable as an outsider.”

Moving On begins on BBC One at 2.15pm on Monday, while The Donor episode can be seen on Thursday